THE PRICE SHE'LL PAY: For the secret she never knew she had...

by Cara Charles

  Mark caught her eye, and smiled.

  BACK AT THE OFFICE, Shirley walked Sean to his cubicle carrying Rogers’ dinner from the Mission. She’d watched Sean give Sarah everything out of his wallet plus his business card.

  Sean’s boxes were gone. Shirley watched Sean process it.

  “Did Rogers move my boxes to his office?”

  “On my orders...”

  “Well, I guess this is good-bye then Mrs. Cronkite,” Sean stepped up to shake her hand to thank her for the last three years. “I want to thank you...”

  Interrupting, she grabbed his hand, “On my orders... Rogers put your things back in your desk. Ready to get back to work?”

  “Ma’am? You mean it?” Sean hugged her.

  “Do you mean it?” Shirley searched his eyes.

  “With all my heart!” Sean shook her small bony hands so hard it dislodged her glasses.

  Shirley laughed as her glasses slid down her nose.

  “Oh God, sorry. Yes ma’am. You’ll never be disappointed in me again. And thank you from the bottom of my heart. And thank you for dinner at the Mission. That’s quite a place for learning to count your blessings. I promise, I won’t ever let you down again. Ever!” Sean hugged her hard.

  Shirley returned his embrace with her glasses askew again and dared to kiss his cheek. He was back. Leaving her glasses cockeyed on her face, they both laughed.

  Shirley took his face in her hands and looked into his grateful brown eyes, “You’re a good boy, Sean. Remember that. Fight the impulses. You can always be a winner, if… you want it badly enough. Now this is a look.”

  Shirley reposed her glasses with her new cockeyed profile.

  Sean laughed. It felt so good to laugh. She was making him laugh. He loved this woman, so full of fun and wisdom.

  “Yes ma’am. Those days are over. Now I can offer Mike, Sarah and little Sean my place to stay in, until their lives get better.”

  “If you give me the keys, I can pick them up in my old Dodge Dog. They’ll be there waiting for you when you get home. Still at 16 Charlotte Drive number three, upstairs?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Sean handed Shirley his key ring. Shirley knew where he lived. She lived close by. “That’s a great idea. I want them to have a home for Christmas.”

  “It’s very kind of you to help them. Look in your cubby. Have a good weekend catching up.”

  “Yes ma’am. A million thank yous for your kindness, Mrs. Cronkite!”

  “Call me Shirley, honey. You’ve earned it and you’re welcome.” She winked, and then left his cubicle with a spring in her step, and the dinner box.

  Inside the cubby was an 11x14 object, in holiday wrapping. Sean thought it felt like a glass frame, he quickly opened it.

  It was a beautifully, hand-embroidered sampler of their building, the Capitol, the Supreme Court, the White House, the Lincoln and Washington Memorials. Cherry trees in bloom, vines, and flowers encircled a centered phrase –

  Dearest Sean ~

  “Today, December 17th

  Is

  The First Day

  of

  The Rest of your Life.”

  Your friend always

  ~ Shirley Cronkite

  He had to sit down.

  Sean propped it up on his empty bulletin wall and looked at it for a long time, remembering how she had watched him at the Mission, and when he’d given Sarah Erskine all his cash, he looked up to see Shirley smiling at him. She’d given him a wink. He felt one thousand pounds lighter, having put that look in Sarah and Shirley’s eyes.

  He looked at every detail of her work. Then it dawned on him. She’d planned for today. Knowing he would bring himself to the point of getting fired. How hard did she have to work to keep him? He sighed again, eternally grateful.

  FROM ROGERS’ OFFICE, Shirley and Rogers watched Sean open his present and his reaction so touched the both of them, they wiped away tears of relief and happiness then laughed at each other for being so sentimental. Shirley jumped to her feet ready to go, and kissed Rogers.

  “Merry Christmas, Rog.”

  They hugged each other.

  “Merry Christmas, old gal. You’re a good woman.”

  “He’s a good boy. Christmas Eve Dinner? My place?” she said.

  “I’ll bring the Boone’s Farm. Look!” Rogers joked.

  Sean was showing Rogers his present in the camera. They laughed.

  Shirley blew Rogers a kiss, then walked to the elevator.

  THE DOORS OPENED and closed her in. She pushed the garage button.

  She broke down, sobbing.

  Rogers watched his old friend crying in the elevator knowing her heart was full right now, yet she was still shattered. Caring about Sean would make it better, but never completely mend her. Losing her grandson and her daughter would be with her forever. In salvaging Sean, Shirley had won a major victory against her own despair.

  “It will get better, Shirl. I promise it will. Give it time.”

  Shirley jumped. She’d forgotten Rogers could see her in there.

  “Sean’s given you a fresh start, just like you gave him. Call me when you get home.”

  She nodded then wiped her face.

  Shirley turned toward the hidden camera, blew her oldest friend a kiss, and exited the elevator.

  SEAN OPENED his computer and put in his password.

  As it booted, he looked at Shirley’s beautiful work.

  He opened his work folder and began declassifying his files. He could feel long suppressed emotions building. He’d almost lost this wonderful women’s respect, and friendship. He wasn’t too old or proud to admit he needed to be mothered.

  He had yearned for a good mother, his whole life. Shirley Cronkite had given him a gift, his best self. Someone being kind to him was so foreign. Her touching belief in him, the lesson she’d taught him today.

  His sudden welling tears made it hard to see the screen. He tried to keep his mind on his work.

  HE SUCCEEDED for twenty minutes as he thought about how he’d repay her. Then it hit him. Sean was drawn back to the embroidery.

  It distracted him even when his eyes weren’t looking at it. He began to realize, just how much she really cared about him. He really had cared about her for a long time, admitting to himself now he’d always yearned for her attention, like a lost child. But he was too afraid of those feelings. They only made him feel more alone.

  It was so evident now she’d fought hard to save him from his own self-destruction.

  Sean thought about her sitting at home working on this for him. He thought about her planning today, with Rogers and Mark. He thought about today’s life lesson she was trying to get him to understand. She was trying to teach him to resurrect his true self, to learn what rewards giving from the heart felt like.

  Like lightning, it hit him. In a week it would be Christmas. He hoped she could find Mike, Sarah, and Sean. Maybe Mark would know where to find them. He chastised himself for not thinking about taking them home, directly. He’d invite them to stay with him as long as they needed to.

  He’d give them a real Christmas. He’d buy them a tree and gifts and cook dinner for them. They’d be so shocked and it would make him happy to see happiness and hope return to their faces.

  Maybe by next week he and Shirley could find Mike or Sarah a job. Now that would be a fabulous, unforgettable Christmas.

  He would take Shirley to an event at the Kennedy Center. Did Shirley have a family?

  “Oh, my God,” Sean had remembered and looked away from the screen and back to her embroidery.

  Shirley’s grandson and his mother had died together in a double overdose last New Years. That thought, stopped him dead. She’d wanted to save him, Sean Rooney, and she had. Perhaps she would like to join them for Christmas, his new little family.

  Berlin archive documents from 10/01/1945 to 10/11/1945 were next to be declassified and released to FOI website. He typed 10/01/1945. Then he typed 10/...

 
Blinding tears welled up in his eyes as Sean realized he was her grandson’s age.

  He looked away from the keyboard, over at his gift. He wiped his eyes with his left hand. Then typed finishing the dates. He automatically hit enter twice, as always.

  The alarm sounded and he looked at his last set of dates seeing the problem, fixing the 22/2056 to 11/1945.

  ‘Shit! Be more careful.’

  Declassified documents from 10/01/1945 to 10/11/1945 were released for public consumption, via the Freedom of Information Act.

  FOI, the Freedom of Information Act website now contained a report from an obscure WW II German brothel prison camp a few miles from Ravensbruck, about missing and unaccounted for women of African and Middle Eastern decent and the misfiled Eisenhower flight record of May 8th 1945. In longhand, two names had been added to the list of typed names; A.R. Washington, U.S. Army nurse - weight 126 lbs, and I. Kimirov, U.S.S.R. Army Master Sergeant - weight, 190 lbs.

  LT. CHARLES LARSEN had had to add the name of Otis’s niece and the Russian interpreter’s name to the flight record on the spot because the ground chief was insisting, because it was General Eisenhower’s plane. Then the ground chief handed off the clipboard, and hustled to help load General Eisenhower’s plane because the man himself was standing in the doorway of the plane waiting on his lieutenant. Charles took the flight record off the clipboard and shoved it in his flight jacket pocket and ran to the plane.

  LATER AFTER A QUICK shower and uniform change, Charles had shoved it in his overcoat pocket, and rushed out of his room to accompany the General to the Covert Ops HQ in St. Ermin’s hotel in London.

  After a few drinks in the hotel’s Caxton Bar, Charles rediscovered it in his overcoat pocket and then quickly threw it away in the hotel’s lavatory.

  SOME HUMBLE PRIVATE charged with finding drops meant for spies, had found it while emptying the trash. Never one to “rock the boat,” the private waited until the XO’s desk in his top floor office was empty. Then the private shoved it in the bottom of the papers in the OUT box. Quite relieved, he gladly went back to his humble duties.

  AND HERE IT WAS, all these years later.

  It had come back to haunt… everyone.

  CHAPTER FIVE — MUSE CORPORATION SECRET LAB

  THE VILLAGE OF REGENSBERG

  NEAR ZURICH

  1930, 17 DECEMBER

  JAN TORSEN POSED as the fit, middle-aged janitor for the lab. He went about his duties, dusting the desk of infamous geneticist, Dr. Herman Wise Jr., the head of this secret lab.

  Jan a.k.a. “Janitor” wore an i-Pod-like listening devise for hearing the approach of the often-sleepless scientists. The Blackberry in his pocket vibrated and the hair on his neck stood up. Janitor sighed, knowing battle lines were drawn.

  Confident he was alone, Janitor logged on to check the Dr. Wise’s email. There was an email from the College Park National Archives with attachment. With gloved hand, he opened it. Dr. Herman Wise Jr., the controversial genetic scientist was not careless about security. Janitor with his expertise had easily breached their security.

  Janitor scanned the declassified OKW Nazi’s April 1945, Lakes Camp Report of the disappearance of a block of ethnic women of Middle Eastern and African decent from this secret Nazi brothel/senior officer’s club in a converted Inn near Ravensbruck.

  Jan couldn’t believe what he read next. Sadly, there was the unexpected trump card, merely filed by some efficient clerk by the date, the 8 May 1945 flight record of General Eisenhower’s flight back to England, now also declassified as unimportant because no one would know the importance of these documents any longer, except Mavra Kimirov.

  ‘Why the hell did they keep them? There was Ivan Kimirov’s name and American Army Nurse, A. R. Washington.’

  Janitor had Mavra’s email accounts. He checked them. Nothing. Only time and their METAPHOR mathematicians would tell, if they had found all of her accounts. The time zone difference would buy them precious time.

  He inserted a Stick drive with the new capture and scrub program into the Doctor’s computer. Then with another, Janitor scrubbed the new FOIA info from the email, trash, and hard drive onto his Stick drive. Via his Blackberry, he encrypted and forwarded them to Desiree and Lyle.

  Unknown to Janitor, a recently retired MI-6 agent, the same FOIA message was sitting in Mavra Kimirov’s disguised email inbox for a millisecond.

  An IM message jumped in his hands. It was his NSA associate. He’d gotten Mavra’s itinerary. Berlin, Israel, New York, Maryland, Mammoth Mountain, California. Amanda was buried in Maryland and Elise had a condo in Mammoth. If she left Berlin an hour after the bombing she’d be touching down at Tel Aviv Yafo. Maybe they could detain her there.

  “Jesus,” he said.

  Jan cc’d it to Dear. Then added -- ‘#1 Artist ACTIVATED, #2 Plumber on STANDBY. JTR’

  She called him and they discussed the multiple scenarios at length.

  Time, weather, and reliability were three factors Jan could rely on his oldest friend, Sid to handle they both agreed. He could hear the fatigue in Dear’s voice as he hung up.

  Janitor closed the door to his supply closet. He considered activating Iain #2 a.k.a. the Plumber, but held off.

  The outer circle of METAPHOR consisted of a very select few, trustworthy former CIA human intelligence ‘HUMINT’ field agents, NSA signal intelligence ‘SIGINT’ analysts, ‘ELINT’ Electronic intelligence folks, NSA whistleblowers, some from Britain’s GCHQ like himself, British sister to the NSA, a few from Canada, Australia, Ireland, and New Zealand lived as moles in METAPHOR’s version of a WIT-SEC, a Witness Security or Protection Program.

  Since 9/11 one by one the “Ex-communicators,” strategic in their expertise had “died” of natural causes, their ages solidified death, now gone from their former lives to assume their new lives and identities. METAPHOR laid their own fiber optic cable when all the new trans-ocean cables were being laid after 9/11, a favor provided by the same cable laying company employed by the communications companies and the NSA. Like a suffocating web, the fiber optic communication cables circled the globe, hundreds of times.

  By 2018, NSA wanted a computer that operated at exaflop speed, one quintillion calculations a second.

  Discreet British, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, Bay Area, Northwest, and Mid-West and Indian billionaire benefactors, who believed a democracy was only as strong as the integrity of the protectors of their Constitutions, funded METAPHOR. What tyrants would do, METAPHOR would quietly, anonymously undo. Since 9/11 the Bush-Cheney Administration Directive 16 blasted the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment.

  Billions spent, creating Big Brother.

  The NSA was listening to you, every minute of every day until Mr. Snowden spilled the beans making the President and Congress take action, but Congress somehow missed the crossed fingers that a certain General held behind his back as he testified to their investigating committee.

  CHAPTER SIX — BROTHERS IN ARMS

  LONE PINE, CALIFORNIA

  THE OLD BLACK BAKELITE WALL PHONE in Sid’s Central California kitchen rang. Sid’s easel was looking west through his picture window, setting up to work on his “first light” oil paintings series of the Alabama Hills for the next morning.

  Sid had just arrived home, he heard his phone ring as he fumbled with the remote to open his front door. When he didn’t answer his cell buzzed in his pocket.

  Jan’s text said the big mission had arrived, he had time to meet the plane in Mammoth. Problem was he replied, Mavra was only flying around, nothing could be pinned on her.

  Jan texted, ‘Ivan had blown up the train station, he’d admitted as much and he’d disappeared too.’

  Jan would be calling.

  His recent mission scuba gear Sid threw into the garage by the door, but hurried to hang the wet suit.

  He walked to his aged stereo that would still play LP albums to turn down Buffalo Springfield’s “Expecting to Fly” as he counted the phone ri
ngs.

  Janitor listened as he too counted. No machine would ever pick up. Sid would not allow his real voice to be recorded, especially because the NSA recorded everything now. Janitor activated his modulator, ready to sound like an old geezer.

  “What do you want, you old fish monger?” Sid asked Jan.

  “Why you! You old hippie.” Janitor replied, laughing.

  “Who’s old? Thought they buried you with pomp and circumstance.”

  “Tell me you’re not into runny Oatmeal with a Viagra chaser?” Janitor asked, loving Sid’s laugh to come.

  Sid laughed hard. “Never will need that stuff. I’m a homemade granola man from the Sunshine State of herbal enlightenment. At least, I don’t fart Bangers and Mash in my sleep.”

  “Oh! At your age Deadhead, granola gives you gas.” Jan said.

  “At the market the other day I blamed it on the granny ahead of me.”

  Janitor laughed. God, Sid made him laugh, even in the worst circumstances. They’d chewed a lot of dirt together.

  “Your date for the evening, you mean?”

  “Ha! Truthfully, she was too young for me.”

  “Ah! Well then, you old hippie. Ready for fifty yard-line tickets? Niners and Hawks!”

  “I’m always ready for a game with those two.”

  “Pick up your tickets at the usual place at 1000 hours, today. Sorry for the short notice. If you miss today’s game, get the next one. Solid?”

  “Solid. Hey? Let’s go fishing at our old place in Mexico. We’re long overdue.”

  “You’re on. I’ll bring the rum.”

  “And I’ll cook. What is it with you islanders? Hating food with color. Adios, amigo.”

  JANITOR FINISHED SHINING the latrine’s faucets, electronically swept the lab for listening devices, reset the cameras, then planted more devices. Janitor petted all the lab animals especially the bunnies, and put drops of protection medicine in their water, then left the lab for his room upstairs.

  CHAPTER SEVEN --. LONE PINE, CALIFORNIA

  ALABAMA HILLS, WHITNEY PORTAL RD

  Sid had called Jan back as per their routine.